Dirty Dawg Falls on Hard Times

[brewdude]

nah, it's chassis'.

I think anytime a word ends in an S, then an apostrophe is used to show the plural.

But I'm sure somebody will correct me.

I thought the apostrophe was to make the word possessive.

[Teleguy61]

Great post Phil by the way.

Sorry for your news Taylor.

[Randy Magee]

The plural of chassis is chassis... the differentiation is in the way it is pronounced... chas-ee = singular, chas-eez = plural

[Structo]

Glad we got that cleared up.

[wyatt]

That is the chassis. (cha-sē)
Those are the chassis. (cha-sēz)
That chassis's holes are too far apart. (cha-sēs)
All of those chassis' holes are too far apart. (????, cha-sēs? cha-sēz?)

The latter two are colloquial, as old school grammar books would say you do not assign the possessive to inanimate objects (instead you would write, "The holes are too far apart on those chassis."). Singular possessive chassis' is also acceptable, as with many words that are ambiguous, writers are granted discretion to choose as long as they are consistent.

[Phil_S]

Great post Phil by the way.

Thanks. I'm over 60...walked to school in snow drifts up to my chin, uphill both ways, yadayadayad...I had more than one genuine old school English teacher. When I got to college, I found that I was able to run circles around my peers when it came to writing, simply because I knew the rules [1]. I actually had to look this one up as I just couldn't remember what it was called, but at least I knew it was a "codified" exception.

[1] It didn't necessarily make me smarter. There were lots who had more on the ball than me, but I got to keep up simply for having good form. Looking good counts for more than I had imagined. Some professors automatically downgraded your paper, regardless of the caliber of the content, just for poor grammar, spelling, and sentence/paragraph construction. We used typewriters in those days, so you couldn't be lazy about it and let the computer do it for you. Transcription from handwritten drafts, that was the norm. (Computers were behemoth machines with very little RAM and ran on punch cards. You had to wait overnight to get the answer to 1+1. I did not have the vision to understand that I should have majored in computer programming or whatever it was called back then.)

[martin manning]

But chassis is a French word, so it won't accept English grammar without an argument.

[cbass]

The plural form of chassis is pronounced chassĪ

[morcey2]

But chassis is a French word, so it won't accept English grammar without an argument.

I wondered why every time I started drilling one that I had this extreme urge to drop my rifle and surrender.

singular: aluminum-box-looking-thing
plural: aluminum-box-looking-things
or shorter: aluminum-boxen.

In short:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll

Matt

[Reeltarded]

But chassis is a French word, so it won't accept English grammar without an argument.

Oh no you don't.

[Structo]

Is that like Cactus and Cacti?

[kkregsg]

Actually, I had some email contact with Brian to express my condolences when I found out. He did say he hopes to get the business back up and running, but gave no time frame. Great product at a fair price. Best wishes to him.

[sepulchre]

I suppose we have "fishes" but that really isn't a proper word . . .

Actually it is, if used as a verb. Jes sayin

[Structo]

I thought it was fishies

Or is that fishy?

Like something smells fishy.

[David Root]

Dang! And I thought the plural of moose was meece!